How to get your offline business to grow beyond local

I got an email from a listener in the audience who said she had a yoga studio and wanted to know how she could grow it. She wanted to know how to use online ads, and social media like Instagram.

My response to her was that maybe those platforms are hard to use for a reason. I thought her market was more limited to local advertising. I thought of her before recording this interview and here’s why.

Today’s guest built a company that took fitness online. And his cofounder started with a yoga studio!

So anyone in my audience who has a business in a fixed location can learn how to go online and grow beyond local.

Andy Fossett

Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I’ve done over a thousand interviews with proven entrepreneurs.

And I get email from my audience all the time. Ideally I’d like to see everyone from my audience here in my office, 201 Mission Street if you’re listening to me. That’s where I happen to be this year. But second best is getting email.

And I got an email from a woman named Gina, who said that she’s associated with a yoga studio and she wants to know how to grow it using online ads and Instagram and social media and everything like that. My response to her was maybe those things are pretty hard to use for a reason. Maybe your market is kind of limited to local market and you want to think bigger, go beyond.

I thought about Gina when I sat down to do today’s interview. Today’s guest is cofounder of a company that took fitness online and then went beyond. His cofounder started with a yoga studio. The thing that I think Gina and anyone else who’s thinking fixed location can take away from this is you can go online and expand that way and go broader.

This story of how they did it will help you. That’s my goal for this interview. Anyone who wants to think about how to go online from offline, how to go to education from–actually, how to get into education anyway, this interview is meant for you. So the guest is Andy Fossett. He is the cofounder of GMB Fitness. They teach people how to use their bodies better.

And this interview is sponsored by two companies. The first is Bench. I got some email from somebody with a really troubling feedback about one of my past ads for Bench. I’ve got an update on that coming up in a moment. And then the second sponsor is a podcast that if you like Mixergy you should go listen to. It’s called Noah Kagan Presents. I’ll tell you more about Noah Kagan Presents later and how to get a dollar for subscribing to it, literally, a dollar just for subscribing. They want to pay you.

But first, I’ve got to get into this interview. Andy, good to have you on here.

Andy: Thanks, Andrew. Definitely nice.

Andrew: Dude, I can’t tell how big a site it is. I was trying to check out your site. It’s a WordPress site. You’re hosted by one of the WordPress hosting companies. There’s no way to figure it out. How big is the business? Let’s talk dollars and cents if you’re comfortable with that.

Andy: Sure. Last year, we crossed over $2 million in revenue from online product sales. We have more than 20,000 clients. We’ve had probably 200,000 people download our materials. Millions of people have seen our YouTube videos. It’s not the biggest fitness business online by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely for a kind of blog-centered online company, I think we’re doing pretty well.

Andrew: And when somebody’s paying you to learn, what’s an example of something they’re paying to learn and how much are they paying?

Andy: Sure. We have courses that start around $75 to $100. That includes a few, maybe two months to three or four months’ worth of training plans. When they purchase a program, they log on to our site, they get access to videos, training plans. They get access to feedback from coaches and all kinds of supplemental materials, everything from warm-up to cool down, how to progress, how to improve, how to know you’re doing the exercise right or wrong, all of that stuff.

Andrew: Okay. All right. And you’re a guy who comes from a background of kind of entrepreneurs. Would you consider what your dad did entrepreneurial?

Andy: Not really. My father was a plumber. He was a tradesman. There was quite a while that he and his brother and father had a family business. It really more than anything turned me off of wanting to be entrepreneurial. He was one of those guys that ended up working 80 hours a week and really sacrificing his health and not being very happy with it.

Andrew: I don’t have that kind of a business. I’m not a plumber, obviously. I can’t work with my hands. I felt like I had a really good handle on my hours. But last night I came home late. My mind was still on work. This morning, my mind was still on work instead of on the family. Do you find really honestly with what you’ve built that you’re not stressed about work?

Andy: No, because I’m obsessive.

Andrew: What’s an example of how obsessive you are?

Andy: Well, I don’t think it’s destructive or anything, but definitely last year I’ve had to struggle to learn how to take weekends off, for example. That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about the company. It’s something I’ve been building over six years. It’s one of my babies. I have a human baby and I have a company baby.

It’s something I think about all the time because I’m really passionate about it. The first few years, though, we were just hustling all the time, trying to push and trying to figure out, trying to make something stick. At those times, I was working 12, 14 hours a day. Now I don’t have to work as hard all the time, but I think still some part of my brain is always on it.

Andrew: And part of your background was working for Clay Collins, the guy who created Leadpages. I didn’t know that until I saw–I guess your LinkedIn profile says it–but I didn’t know until I saw the pre-interview notes on this. What did you do for Leadpages? Those guys are monsters when it comes to online conversion and great content.

Andy: Yeah. So I started out, I was actually one of Clay’s first internet marketing clients, I think. I think the first person that joined was Andy Drish and then Tracy, his current partner at Leadpages. And then I think I was number three. So I learned a lot of basic marketing stuff and got pretty good at some parts of it. Clay actually hired me to do some copywriting, and eventually I learned his material very well, ended up coaching a lot of his clients.

Andrew: I see.

Andy: I used to do coaching calls for his paid membership and some things like that.

Andrew: I see. This was back in the day when he was teaching marketing before he created that software platform that allows anyone to create a landing page.

Andy: Yeah. It was about maybe the first few months of Leadpages I was continuing to work with him and starting to coach people on how to use Leadpages and landing pages and that kind of thing too. But that was also around the time that GMB was starting to really gel. So I stepped away from that so I could focus on this.

Andrew: Tell me about your cofounder who had that yoga studio.

Andy: Sure. His name was Ryan. Ryan was a competitive gymnast all through childhood into college, and he had a freak training accident. Someone fell on his knee and basically ended his competition career. He went to Japan, did different martial arts, competed in judo with the police team in Osaka. Again, competition ruined his shoulder. So he decided he was going to take up yoga, did that for quite a while and opened a small little studio in Japan, even did a DVD for like the Japanese version of ESPN on yoga. So he was doing pretty well with it.

Andrew: Meaning he was selling it.

Andy: Yeah, he was selling it.

Andrew: Did he do the commercials himself?

Andy: No. The TV company did all of the video and did all of the promotion and everything. He was the model and teacher for it.

Andrew: I see. Cool.

Andy: That’s where that was. Maybe about a year after that is when I met him. I moved to Osaka with my future wife at that point and started working out with him. That’s kind of how we started.

Andrew: What got you to Japan?

Andy: I also did martial arts from a young age. After college, I went over there to teach English and fell in love with it, went back a few times.

Andrew: Okay. So there you are. You’re teaching English in Japan at some point.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: The public school education system, which I thought was tremendous in Japan and flush, in fact–what happened?

Andy: Well, they do really well at tests. They’re very good test-based stuff. They’re very successful in a lot of ways, but I think Japan’s going through what a lot of countries are right now. A lot of industries are getting privatized. A lot of money that was there is not in the public sector as much as it was anymore.

English was one of those things they didn’t consider essential because everyone speaks Japanese in Japan. So English education in Osaka at that time was downgraded, and I wasn’t able to be full-time. I wasn’t able to have benefits like health or anything like that. It was getting harder and harder to find work at all. I was starting to look at things. That’s when I started looking online and started studying with Clay and learning some of that stuff too.

Andrew: Why did Ryan need you?

Andy: Well, Ryan was doing pretty well in his little studio, but it was small. He was having trouble really growing. He got to the point where it was sustaining. It was working. He found clients. He found some really good clients, some celebrities, some very well off people. He was working with the kind of clientele that everyone wants when you’re a personal trainer or yoga teacher, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

He had a small child and another one on the way. He wanted to know there was a future, that he had some place that it could go that it could increase. Trying to promote that around Japan as a foreigner, he just found that he had more obstacles than he really had any aces in the hole there.

Andrew: I see. By then you’d already had some experience. You’d already learned from Clay Collins. You’d already started to do some online marketing. So you could bring those talents in.

Andy: Right. We were talking about where to go from here. We were having one of those guys in their mid-30s conversations about legacy and what to do for the rest of our lives. He was saying he wanted to further and I was thinking well, we probably could. We could reach a much bigger audience, an English-speaking audience and an audience that is comfortable purchasing things online. We could get in front of these people with the things he’s able to do. I knew we could put things out there and people would be interested.

Andrew: All right. You mentioned that in the 12-hour days period of your life, you were really feeling around trying to figure out what the product was. What was one example of a bad version of the product or figuring it out wrong?

Andy: Well, we made our first version of our product, actually, it was a two-DVD set with an 85-page spiral bound manual because we thought that’s what fitness products were supposed to be. It’s a DVD. You put it in. But then we realized that video was becoming a lot less expensive, and we were able to start putting things online.

But the biggest thing wasn’t the product itself. It was that we thought we had to shoehorn ourselves into this fitness paradigm in this world that everyone, “Oh, you’re doing aerobics, you’re doing strength training or something else,” but what we really got to the point is when we realized maybe about four years into it that a lot of people really just wanted something more general than that or something more open-ended. They didn’t necessarily want abs. They just wanted more feeling of agency, more confidence in their body, more control.

We got the message finally from our clients that they didn’t need to necessarily be elite performers, but they wanted to feel like they were getting good at something.

Andrew: I see. So the business at first was called Gold Medal Bodies. You were going to show people how to do that. But they didn’t really want that?

Andy: Yeah. I think a lot of people do, but they want that as a stepping stone to feeling more confident or if you look at like Maslow’s Hierarchy, there’s the not dying, being able to pass on your genes, being able to look good enough to get a date. Then at some point there’s like, “I just want to be able to do cool shit. I want to be able to have fun.”

Andrew: Like what?

Andy: I want to be able to go with my friend to a climbing wall. I want to be able to go on a hike. I want to be able to go take up stand up paddle boarding if a friend comes in from out of town. I want to be able to do any of those things. I don’t want to have to say, “My back is kind of hurt. I don’t know if I’m strong enough. What if I get winded?”

Andrew: Yeah. I would hate that. That’s when I’d start to feel like maybe there’s–that’s when I’d start to feel like I was becoming like the old people that I hated when I was a kid because they were constantly complaining. They could never do anything.
Andy: Right.

Andrew: And then they would blame their age or they’d blame their kids or something. It seems like such a sad life. I get it. That was the market. The first thing that you came out with though, did you launch a website first?

Andy: Yeah, we had our website at GoldMedalBodies.com.

Andrew: Okay.

Andy: We were fairly successful as a side business selling these kinds of fitness courses. It did well. It was good, but it never felt like it had the potential to be great. For us, we kind of kept it on the side. Ryan was still teaching at a studio in Japan. Our other partner, Jarlo, was still doing physical therapy. I was still working with Clay at that point.

So we kept GMB as a side business, and it was doing well, but we never got to the point where we really felt, “This is it.” But when we found it, that’s when we had it switched and changed our focus and pivoted a bit. Things since then have been–we were able to take a little bit of a leap of faith with things.

Andrew: I see. Now that I see that it was GoldMedalBodies.com, I see an old version of your website complete with what looks like a box that the video would come in. I see.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: So you were doing this all on the side. How did you get customers?

Andy: Mostly a lot of YouTube videos was how a lot of people found us, a little bit of posting things on Facebook and stuff. But most of it came from YouTube, to be honest, in the early days.

Andrew: You just shoot a video teaching, and then someone would come over to your site to get the rest of the lesson. That model still works on YouTube. Does it still work for you?

Andy: Yeah. We have a lot of people that use our YouTube channel. We have a couple of videos that have been seen several million times, like a HIIT mobility video. We have a handstand tutorial that gets a lot of hits. People look for those things and they find us. We have a lot of friends that do very, very well on YouTube too.

Andrew: What is it with handstands? One of my sponsors who I’ll talk about in a moment is trying to do a handstand. So every day online, he’s chronicling his goal towards that. What’s the point of a handstand? Why are people so obsessed with it?

Andy: I think for one thing is that it’s totally frivolous. It’s something that you do just to say you can do it. There’s a bit of a party trick aspect to it. Also, when you try it, you find out that it’s a lot harder than it looks. You can’t just kick your legs up and stand there. People assume it’s going to be easy, and then they find out that it’s challenging and then they want to overcome that.

Andrew: And that’s part of or one of your partners, I guess, was doing a handstand and that helped shift your direction. Talk about that.

Andy: Yeah. So Ryan and Jarlo were involved in another fitness company in the very beginning. They were actually at a seminar somewhere near the Seattle area teaching this other fitness system and some weight training, some resistance training and that kind of deal. Then there was a break and Ryan started messing around doing handstands, handstand pushups and some basic gymnastics stuff.

He kind of came down out of his handstand, and he said he looked around and said there were 20 people standing around just watching him. Everyone was like, “Teach us that.” That’s when he realized that, “Okay, people want to learn this. I had no idea.” It was kind of a big mental shift for us.

Andrew: Let’s come back to Gina who emailed me on January 5th. Gina, I’m saying that so you know who you are. What’s the first thing she needs to do if she wants to go online with her studio?

Andy: Sure. Well, she needs to figure out what is the thing that makes her unique. Obviously, if she’s teaching in a yoga studio and is able to attract clients, there’s something about her that is attracting those clients because there are a ton of yoga instructors in every city.

So she’s got to find out what it is that she’s doing that makes those people want to learn from her and figure out how to amplify that, how to turn that up and how to present it in a visual medium online because especially now, video is huge, Instagram video, Facebook video, YouTube, but anywhere you go, you scroll down and you’ve got something in motion and it has to catch your interest in about half a second before you scroll past it. She’s got to find something, I think, that is a little bit of a visual hook that’s going to make people take notice.

Andrew: I see. When you say amplify what she’s good at, what do you mean by that? Let’s take an example since I don’t know Gina’s yoga studio specifically. There’s a woman called Jane Austin, who women in San Francisco love, mothers in San Francisco love, partially because she does pregnant woman yoga. She also does baby yoga. That part is what they’re most attracted to. Let’s suppose that what she’s especially good at is yoga for pregnant women. How do you amplify that?

Andy: Well, one of the first things is to show her teaching a pregnant woman. Already she’s going to get the attention of anyone who has a friend who’s pregnant.

Andrew: I see.

Andy: Because all pregnant woman–that’s generalizing–but I think most pregnant woman, certainly my wife when she was pregnant, they worry about their bodies and they worry about the health of their baby as well. So if you’re showing a safe way to do exercise while pregnant, I think you’re going to get a lot of attention anyway.

Andrew: I see. So, in that case would you need to amplify it?

Andy: In that case, I think it’s already there. So, then it’s a matter of what’s the angle she’s going to take on that? Is it going to be safe exercise while you’re pregnant? Is it going to be ways to prevent unnecessary weight gain while pregnant? Is it going to be exercises that might ease the pain of childbirth? I don’t know. There could be any number of things.

Andrew: When you talk about these benefits, Andy, are you saying focus on the benefits so you know what content to create or focus on the benefit so you know what your offering is?

Andy: It’s a little bit of both. I really think that there’s tons of content out there. Without a focus for that content, without something to tie it around, it’s just going to get lost in the shuffle of everything that we see every day, right? But if she has something that she loves teaching, some particular aspect of yoga that she wants to focus on if it’s pregnancies, if it’s injury prevention, if it’s extreme flexibility or whatever, any of the things that she’s really into, it can guide the way that you talk about it to leads and potential clients. It can guide the content you create. It can guide the programs you create to sell, your products as well.

Andrew: Okay. So, for you, what you guys did was you focused on YouTube early on?

Andy: Uh-huh.

Andrew: And then once you show it using whatever channel people decide to use, maybe it’s Facebook, maybe it’s Instagram, YouTube, is the next step for you guys did you create a landing page to collect email addresses? You did.

Andy: Yeah. We had some landing pages. When we saw that first handstand tutorial really start taking off on YouTube, we made a more detailed version with a PDF and a downloadable video and we made a landing page for that. That’s where we started.

Andrew: I’m looking at I think the video that you’re talking about. Is it “Straddle Press to Handstand Tutorial for Press Handstand?”

Andy: That’s one of them. I actually believe if you put “handstand tutorial” into YouTube, it’s one of the–

Andrew: It will come up?

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: Okay. I want to ask you why you specifically used WishList Member. That’s an important question for a reason. But first, let me tell people about my first of two sponsors. It’s a podcast very similar to mine. It’s called Noah Kagan Presents. Do you know SumoMe, Andy?

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: What do you know about SumoMe?

Andy: I know it’s started by Noah Kagan from AppSumo, and I know that they help people build their email list, which is super important.

Andrew: Yeah. They do. They built I think it’s over $10 million revenue. I don’t know the exact revenue, but this guy is just building and building it up. He knows business really well and he said, “I like what people like Andrew and others are doing with podcasting. I want to get in, but I don’t want to do what Andrew is doing. I don’t want to be another Andrew imitator.” He said, “You know what I’d like to do?” When I talked to him, I said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “I want to interview the people who are just getting started and give them some challenges and help them see their issue through.”

So he’s got this podcast that he calls Noah Kagan Presents because he interested about that moment in your life when things start to turn. He says, “I’m going to focus on the inflection point. I won’t just interview successful people.” My guess is he might interview some. I think there’s so much power in interviewing somebody successful. But he wants to interview people who are getting started and help them out, help them understand how to find their first customers, help them understand how to grow their business, how to think about marketing. He’s done it really well for a long time. That’s his podcast. He’s really obsessed with giving people challenges because he wants them to take some kind of action.

I asked him, “What kind of challenge do you mean?” He said, “I told people to go into coffee shops and negotiate a price for coffee just to push themselves out of their comfort zone,” but it could even be something like what Andy, what you’re doing, which is tell people to do something physical that’s beyond their current comfort level, like do a certain number of push-ups.

If it’s an entrepreneur who needs to reach out and try to buy some ads, he might challenge them to go spend $100 in the next week on ads and have the whole world of his podcast listenership listen in and see how it goes. That’s the goal behind the podcast. If you’re listening to me, I think you’ll enjoy that podcast.

Because he’s a marketing guy, he’s also trying something pretty interesting. He says, “Andrew, talk about it, tell people to go sign up for the podcast.” So I will, guys. It’s Noah Kagan Presents. Put that into whatever podcast app you’re listening to me on or Google or whatever. If you want a direct link, it’s OkDork.com/podcast. That’s his website. So OkDork.com/podcast. But he’s also going to give you $1 if you subscribe to his podcast. What do you think of that, Andy, as a marketer?

Andy: I think it is one of those silly and brilliant things that Noah comes up with a lot.

Andrew: Right? He says, “Email me.” OkDork has been a site for years, for over a decade, so here’s the email address. Mixergy@OkDork.com. Just, “Dude, I subscribed to your podcast,” and let’s see how he sends you $1. I don’t know what he’s going to do. I think it might be interesting if he has someone on his team mail you a $1 bill or maybe what he’ll do is do PayPal. I don’t know. But I think he’s smart to do that because a podcast subscriber is worth more than $1.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: Is that something you would do?

Andy: Yeah. I’d do that. I think probably in the next few weeks, we’re going to see a lot of Instagram posts of peoples’ dollars that they got from him.

Andrew: You know what? That is why actually sending a $1 bill would be more interesting than PayPaling a $1 bill, right? It costs just a few extra bucks, but he could have someone on his team do it. That’s brilliant. I wonder what he’s going to do. All right. OkDork.com/podcast or go to Noah Kagan Presents and don’t forget to tell him, “Hey, give me my buck.” Mixergy@OkDork.com to ask for your dollar. Man, I’d love to see what he does.

All right. Here’s why I’m asking about WishList Member. I know that you installed it. I installed it too. WishList Member is a plugin for WordPress that turns your site into a membership site. I installed it because I wanted continuous recurring revenue for Mixergy so I could predict my revenue like I could predict my expenses. Was that your thought too?

Andy: For us in the beginning, we just wanted to be able to control access. We wanted to be able to have like a protected download page. So that was what we used WishList Member for. We’ve since moved on and we have our own kind of in-house system that we’ve custom built. But WishList worked really well for that sort of thing until we got so many different variations on our product that it was hard. Then at one point, we did use it to protect a forum for recurring things as well.

Andrew: And then forums died as a product, right?

Andy: Right. Nobody wants to be on a forum anymore. So we have a forum that’s almost dead, and we have all those same people in a secret Facebook group.

Andrew: That’s what we did. So it seems like it’s Facebook groups right now or Slack if you want to put together a community for your people. You put it together in WishList Member, and you said that at some point, because of the variations of your business, it couldn’t handle it. What kinds of variations did you create?

Andy: Well, what happens in our situation is people would buy one program and then they would decide they want another program or some people would say, “Can’t I get two different programs at the same time?” When you’ve got one program or two programs or one product and it’s a recurring membership or something or if you have like three levels or something like that, I think it works really, really well for that. But every time we added a product, we exponentially increased the number of combinations. So we would have to create a new product, a new page, a new link for every possible combination that someone would want and that just kind of got unwieldy.

Andrew: That was a problem that I had. I used to let people buy one course. Like Clay Collins has a course on Mixergy teaching people how to actually sell products the way that you’re doing it, the way that he did it. He’s an expert at it. In the past, I would have sold each course individually on Mixergy, but it was like you said, a pain to do with WishList. They’ve since updated their software to allow that, but I can understand why at the time you would have given up and said, “I’m going to create my own thing.” I saw it. It’s got your own account information, your own system.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: You told our producer you also went after affiliates. Why did you go after affiliates so early on?

Andy: We didn’t really go after too many of them, honestly. We knew in the very beginning that we didn’t have an audience online, not much of one. We were trying to build it up with YouTube and everything, but we also had a few friends who did have audiences. We had a few friends in other fitness circles that did have email lists. We knew that we could sell a product to those affiliates and we could start to grow a lot faster than we could by just trying to organically pop up in front of people and say, “Hi, we’re nice.”

Andrew: And did it work? Were you able–you got customers from that?

Andy: Yes. So, in the very beginning, our first product actually before GMB, we re-released that yoga video that Ryan had done way back when. We released it, classic ClickBank kind of product with affiliates. We were able to sell–I think in a week we sold like $35,000 worth at like the $45 level.

Andrew: Wow.

Andy: So we acquired a good number of clients from that and grew a bit of a list to start us when we came to GMB.

Andrew: How many of your affiliates or what percentage would you say came from the ClickBank affiliate group versus your site?

Andy: Of our current affiliates, zero.

Andrew: What about back then?

Andy: So, back then, they were all people that we already knew in the very, very beginning, but we just happened to use ClickBank because everybody was using it. So we knew that everybody had an account.

Andrew: Right. Today not so much.

Andy: Not as much. It depends on what industry you’re in, I’m sure. For us, there are a lot of people doing–there are a lot of fitness ClickBank products, but they seem to be not on our side of the ethical tracks, I guess, so to speak.

Andrew: What do you mean?

Andy: There’s a lot of skeesy stuff in fitness, right? There’s “Grow Taller for Idiots.” There are all these things that maybe it’s a good product. I shouldn’t say it’s bad. But there are a lot of things that are promising, “Do this one exercise and it will improve your sex life and give you abs in two weeks.” That’s just wrong. It’s not true. It’s not honest.

They take one thing. They stretch the truth. They try to manipulate your insecurities. They’ve got this 60-day ClickBank refund offer, but it’s just turned into a situation where I think all the people we don’t want to associate with, all the people that don’t have the kind of reputation of quality and really taking care of people seem to be in that sort of world. We are really careful about presenting ourselves as nice people because we really care about our clients and we don’t want people to get the wrong idea.

Andrew: But Andy, $35,000 for your first launch when you didn’t really have a mailing list back in 2010, selling a $47 product. That’s a lot. So how do you end up with what’s about 1,000 orders?

Andy: Yeah. We had what we knew was a good product. I had been practicing copywriting, trying to learn from Clay as best I could. He’s a great copywriter, if anyone doesn’t know. I don’t think he writes anymore, but he was really, really good.

Andrew: He’s service good.

Andy: And we got people onto an email list.

Andrew: Who? It was you, your friends and family and then these affiliates that you got.

Andy: Right.

Andrew: That was it? That’s who you wrote for and it was your copywriting that let you do that.

Andy: Yeah. Copy was one of the main things. Building an email list early on and really focusing on writing good emails.

Andrew: And you built the email list because of the affiliate program. Is that right?

Andy: Yeah, in the very beginning, yes. Then later on through the YouTube videos and the landing pages and that kind of thing.

Andrew: When I look at YouTube as a way of getting customers, I’m so skeptical about it or not skeptical, I know it works for people, I just don’t understand why. The reason that I’m curious is you tell me I’m going to know how to do a handstand by the end of this video. So I watch the video. I even know how to do a handstand, in which case I don’t need you anymore or I don’t, in which case I don’t trust you anymore. If I do need more, like maybe after a handstand I might want to know how to do a pistol squat, then I go and I Google that or I YouTube search that.

Andy: Well, this is the thing is that a lot of times YouTube especially tries to keep you in YouTube. It’s its own ecosystem. A lot of people do well with that. We own the fact that you’re not going to learn a handstand by watching a four-minute video. That’s just not possible, man. We can show you everything you need to know, but we know you’re not going to just jump up and master it after watching a video. So we’re honest about the fact that you’re going to have to practice and there’s going to be an ongoing component. You know what? You might have to spend a couple weeks working on your shoulder flexibility so you can get your arm overhead. You might need to spend a few weeks working on the trunk stability so you’re not flopping around. We have exercises for that too. If you come to our site and enter your email address, we’ll send you a guide that will teach you how to do the things you should do after watching this video and that’s really what we did.

Andrew: Going back to Gina and people like her, they found their hook. They amplified it. They now want to start sending people to a site to collect email addresses. How do they find that lead magnet? What’s your suggestion for figuring out what to do so that they’re not creating 500 different lead magnets, one for every video they throw up on Vine or whatever happens to be popular for the moment?

Andy: I’d say in the beginning is maybe don’t try to come up with the perfect lead magnet at first. For years, we just said, “Hey, sign up and we’ll send you an email next time we release a tutorial.” If you’re putting really good content out there like you are, for example, people probably sign up to your email list just because they know they’re going to get some really good stuff. I think that’s something that works for a lot of people.

Now, over time you’re probably getting some feedback and you’re probably seeing which videos do better, which content does better, which content people say, “I’d really like to know the next step.” That’s when you can say, “This is something that I might want to produce something in depth.” That’s the thing I think that you should do for your lead magnet is you should put something out there, try to get people consuming it and then look for patterns in the feedback you get.

Andrew: All right. That makes sense. Why don’t I take a quick break here to talk about my sponsor, the second and last sponsor? It’s a bookkeeping company, Bench. Do you know Bench?

Andy: I do not.

Andrew: Who does your books?

Andy: We have a very nice accountant in Wisconsin.

Andrew: I never understand when you get like one person. I’ve been told to go get one person. Noah had like this one person. I’m always skeptical because what if they don’t show up? What if they get busy around tax season? It’s just one person. Do you ever have that issue?

Andy: We haven’t, actually. Oddly enough, this guy was recommended to us by Clay. He turned out to just be fantastic. He’s been with us for more than six years now, and I’ve never had any complaints.

Andrew: Wow. What do you pay?

Andy: I have no idea.

Andrew: You don’t? How do you not know that? You know what that’s curious? Presumably, you’re going over your books on a regular basis with them because you have an especially difficult issue because you actually have to account for a lot of small-ish orders, a lot of people sending you under $100, keeping it, what do you use, Stripe to collect payment?

Andy: Yeah. We’re using Stripe now.

Andrew: Right? You use Stripe, so you have to keep track of that and then you have all these random orders online. How are they going to figure out what it is? I have that issue. A lot of people do. The reason that I recommend Bench is they have software that will suck in your data from Stripe. They understand how to use APIs, which a lot of bookkeepers don’t so that the software can do all the manual labor that a human being shouldn’t waste their time on.

Then they have human beings to go over the data because machines and software still will make mistakes and still won’t organize things well or still just won’t know randomly that GMB is a fitness and education site and maybe you will just market it as uncategorized or something. So, they can go to GMB.com. Is it GMB.com? No. It’s not. It’s GMB.io.

Andy: GMB.io.

Andrew: And then they’ll see Andrew is investing in his physical fitness or Andrew is investing in his education. Let’s call that education and they’ll tag it that way. That’s the benefit of Bench, software to pull in data and people to do it. So why did I say that there was a mistake there?

Here’s the thing. I pride myself on getting my audience really good deals form my sponsors. Frankly, that’s the only reason why you’d want to–well, two reasons. You want to use my special URL because you like me and you want to give me credit for turning you onto something and help Mixergy grow, but you also use it because you know you’re going to get a discount. So people went to Bench.co/Mixergy–and for a long time, they got 20% off, they were happy they got the best offer on the site.

Then Bench must have done some test for a short period of time and dude, Andy, my audience was on it. They said, “Wait, Andrew doesn’t have the best offer.” I think it was competitive, but I get it. We went back to Bench and we said, “Look, you’ve got to give us the best offer. Our audience is really on top of this stuff. What do you do?” They said, “Look, it was a small test. I don’t even know how anyone figured it out, but it was a small test. We have to keep testing stuff. We get where you’re coming from.”

Here’s what they said for us. This was never on the site before. This has never been on the site. I know if it ever will be, someone in my audience will tell me. But if you go to the special Mixergy URL, you’re going to get, of course, a 20% discount and you’re going to be able to start a free trial, which frankly doesn’t sound like much, Andy. I know that people are going to say, “Why should I go for a free trial? Everything is a free trial,” right?

We’re talking about free trial in bookkeeping. We’re talking about people in software that are actually going to go in and do your books for you to make sure you’re happy first and then you get to walk away if you’re not happy. That’s a really, really big commitment they’re making to your satisfaction. We’re not just talking about giving you access to software to some app. We’re saying, “These people are going to do your books. Try it out.”

So that is only available to Mixergy people. I love you guys for being on top of stuff and for letting me know. If you’re interested, I’d really urge you to go check them out, Bench.co/Mixergy. If you are ever as an entrepreneur in a situation where your books are out of whack, you start to feel guilty. You start to think–have you ever been there? I’ve been there.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: Are you there right now? Let’s be honest.

Andy: No. We’re doing really well right now. There are times where we’ve had a couple of shifts that I was like, “I don’t know what the hell to do.”

Andrew: One of the problems that I have when my books are out of whack and when they were in the past is that I would blame myself, “Why didn’t I sit down and do the books? Why didn’t I do it?” There’s nobody else you can tell because if you screwed up the books, you screwed up their lives potentially too and why should they do a good job when you screwed up something as basic as the books.

So it starts to really weigh on you. It’s something that you put off. Then another problem is you start to see the numbers the way you want them to, so you neglect certain things that you should be accounting a certain way, say, “That’s a one-time charge,” to have an actual bookkeeper sitting there to say, “Dude, stop spending all this money,” is really helpful. “Look at what you’re doing here,” it’s really helpful. All right, everyone. Go check them out. Bench.co/Mixergy.

You continued with this business and you told Ari there was a turning point for you. Part of the turning point, as I understand, is the redesign of the site. Why is design so important? You inhaled proudly when I even mentioned that.

Andy: Yeah. Usually we like to say that the design isn’t going to be the defining thing that’s going to make somebody decide to buy a product or not. It depends on what you’re selling. I think that design really tells a lot about who you are. We’re really focused on doing things the way that we think is right. We could probably cut corners and compromise our values and make a lot more profit, but we’re really focused on our values because we feel like the people that we serve are going to come to us because they like us and they share some of those values.

Well, our website is one of the ways that we can show what we value. We can show that we value enjoying your exercise because you go to our website and there’s a picture of a guy with a big ass shitting grin on his face doing something cool, right? And we show that we’re professionals. We show that we care enough to make sure the site works. A lot of websites out there, even major companies, you go in there on a mobile device and it’s broken and it doesn’t even work right. What does that say?

Andrew: That drives me nuts. I’ll tell you what it says. It says the founders are old school and they just don’t use the phone as much as the rest of us do, right. They don’t live on their phones.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: I see that redesigning the site. Did it actually help your numbers?

Andy: Yeah. It did. There were a few things that kind of coalesced around the time that we launched the newer version of the website, but it was really one of those things that we got so much positive feedback from. We got so many people telling us, “I always knew that you guys make good tutorials, but I didn’t really know how professional you were. I didn’t really know how much energy there was behind the product that you created.”

I didn’t know when I bought something from you if it would actually be made well or worth it. When they saw the new website, then a lot of people that were just kind of on the fence before even immediately started buying from us. It was amazing. People that didn’t want to talk about us before were suddenly talking about us.

Andrew: Who did your site?

Andy: Actually a good friend of mine in Atlanta did the design. His name is Theo Rosendorf. He actually wrote the book on typography, “The Typographic Desk Reference.” Super cool guy. We hired a web developer to actually build the thing in house, and he’s been with us ever since.

Andrew: I was using SimilarWeb to spy on you to get a sense–do you use SimilarWeb ever?

Andy: Sometimes.

Andrew: I just love–do you look at your own site or your competitors or what?

Andy: I look at a bunch of different things. If I’m ever surfing and I see something cool and I want to say, “How the hell did they do that?” That’s when I use that.

Andrew: No, SimilarWeb is for traffic.

Andy: Oh, for traffic? Oh, no.

Andrew: What’s the tool you’re thinking of, BuiltWith?

Andy: Yeah, BuiltWith.

Andrew: Yeah. I kind of use something–actually, I went to view source to get a sense of what you’re built with. One of the things that stood out for me is you use something called AffiliateWP plugin for WordPress. You guys are managing your own affiliates now?

Andy: Yeah, because we decided that we wanted to focus on great affiliates instead of just having like thousands of affiliates that drove one sale every six months. That’s really not worth dealing with. It’s not worth collecting payee information for something like that.

Andrew: What percentage of your customers are coming from the affiliates?

Andy: One.

Andrew: Oh, really, that small? Okay. So what I did see is that you guys are doing some display advertising.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: How’s that going for you? I thought display was dead.

Andy: So I hear. We’re getting 300% or 400% ROI on our Facebook ads.

Andrew: But you go beyond Facebook, aren’t you? From what I can see here, you’re also buying ads from an ad network called Voluum.

Andrew: I see. It’s not that you’re buying ads, it’s Facebook that’s getting you good results. Do you know anything about your Facebook ads, about what’s working and what it’s working?

Andy: Yeah. We started by just boosting posts. When a post did well, we would boost it, right? Then we finally started getting serious about tracking things, and we figured out that the posts that really did well were like testimonials. We’d have clients send us video after they finish a course and they’d say, “Holy shit, man, I’m so proud of myself. I can do this thing.”

It’s not perfect. They’re not winning the Olympics or anything. They’re regular people, but they’re so happy. They write little things, and they tell us how glad they are and we say, “Hey, can we post that to Facebook?” We do. People love that feeling. So when we share those things, that’s really what gets the biggest results for us.

Andrew: Like this guy Daniel Spencer doing a strong leg exercise. So you’re showing his video he sent you to show he’s able to do this on a plank, which is really cool. I can’t stop watching it. Then that links over a page on your site where I can download your bodyweight circuit routine. As soon as I click that button, it says enter your email address. That’s what you guys are doing. That’s part of your funnel.

Andy: Yes.

Andrew: I see. I’m also on your Facebook page and scrolling to the top and I see that you actually use the upcoming events feature, which I don’t see a lot of people use. What are these events, like the one GMB Fitness Elements Workshop?

Andy: So we actually now have over 50 certified trainers in different cities and countries around the world. People just started coming to us and saying, “Do you have a certification?” And we said, “No, we’ll get right on that.” So we teach people how to train with our methods. We really consider ourselves an education company instead of a fitness company. So, the way we teach is really important to us. We teach people how they teach. and then they go and they do these workshops and it’s something we’re really starting to ramp up a lot more this year.

So we have a lot bigger audience on Facebook than most of our trainers do. So, if we’re able to promote those things locally, there’s going to be a lot more chance of people getting into those live events.

Andrew: I see. Kind of like CrossFit, where now you guys are training trainers who are then going to go out and train people and then you get this whole cult following.

Andy: Sure. Yeah. We’ve got a lot of CrossFit coaches that are our clients and several of our trainers also teach CrossFit. There’s a lot of similarity there.

Andrew: Why then go beyond fitness? If fitness is working for you, you’ve got the certification program. You’ve got people who are doing this all over the world and now starting to do it in person more and more, why get outside of this?

Andy: Well, I think it’s not necessarily as much that we want to do something that’s not fitness. It’s just that we think, “Why do people do fitness?” I think most people, they just want to be able to–they want to be able to get through their day and be happy with themselves and they want to feel good. Most people who work out are not interested in squatting ten more pounds, aside from the fact that they feel good about it. But they’re interested in being strong and feeling like they can lift heavy stuff if need be.

We’re not really trying to get out of fitness. We’re just trying to reframe what fitness is, I think. You don’t have to compare yourself to guys with like 20-pack abs who can squat a car. You don’t have to be like that to be fit enough for you for the things you want to do. I think that’s really more what we’re getting at.

Andrew: You said that you get to that by listening to your customers. In fact, you made a point, we didn’t have any question that prompted this, but Ari at the end of the pre-interview, when you talked to our producer Ari, said, “Did we miss anything?” and you said, “Look, listening to clients has been amazingly huge. This is what we need to include in the interview.” That’s how you got to this?

Andy: Yeah, 100%. How do you listen? No client says, “Dude, I don’t really need six-pack abs. Tell me how to deal with the rest of my life.” Nobody says that. How do you get that out of them? I want to get that out of people.

Andy: Well, we do a lot of things that aren’t that uncommon. Anytime you sign up for anything these days, like two seconds later you get this email from the CEO that says, “Hey, I just noticed you signed up.” And you’re like, “Well, that’s bullshit. No way the CEO is sitting around waiting for me to sign up.”

Andrew: And typing as soon as you hit the enter button. Yes.

Andy: So we do send people an email, but we wait until–we send that email when it’s like 8:00 a.m. Pacific when our support team is on. We send that email that says, “Hey, you sign up for that thing, and we’re really interested in learning some things about you. Here’s some information about us.” We try to come off like we’re real people because we are real people and we try to show them that we care and we say, “What is it you want us to learn? How can we help you? What brought you here that we can help you with?”

Andrew: And so after they sign up for–is it the free stuff or the paid stuff that you ask that?

Andy: For the free stuff.

Andrew: I actually got one of your emails. I saw you do send an email immediately from the CEO. Is that weird that I just said that? I feel like I just broke the–

Andy: It depends on the time of day. If you signed up during a time that a regular person would be awake, yes.

Andrew: I see. Okay. Here’s the interesting thing. You say, “Hit reply.” I checked the email address to see what’s the situation here. I thought that was interesting because most people don’t want you to reply and they have no reply from, etc. You want me to reply. That’s not going to you. It’s going to a team of people, right? It’s going to Howdy@GMB.io.

Andy: Yes.

Andrew: So what do you do with all the data that people hit reply with?

Andy: We have copious, copious notes.

Andrew: Who takes those notes?

Andy: What’s that?

Andrew: Who takes those notes and how do you make them useful?

Andy: Our entire support team takes those notes. In the beginning it was me and it was also Amber, our first hire. But now we have five people that answer emails. I still answer a good number of them. We have things. We tag them different ways. We reply. If we find a good one with a good question or good comment, then we’ll share that on a company chat for everyone to see.

We make sure that the information that people send us, that they tell us is shared with everyone. Everyone in the company sees like the really good comments or the good questions or the things where someone is really unsure and has something that we haven’t covered before. We always like to see all of that.

Andrew: I should do that too. So, if somebody emails–I think we use Hi@Mixergy.com. I know we use Contact@Mixergy.com. We even have like a Howdy or Heya, but that doesn’t go to everybody. I don’t know who that goes to. Whatever our email address is that goes to the support team, if somebody emails something that’s especially relevant, should I just tell my support team, “Email it to the whole team?”

Andrew: What about this–I want to get to the stuff that changes the business and takes it in a direction you never could think to go in. How did you get to that?

Andy: Here’s the thing. When someone takes a time to reply, you can learn a lot about them by the way they reply. If we ask what people are interested in and people just say, “Want abs.” Well, okay, that’s probably not going to be somebody that we’re going to be able to keep a conversation with.

But a lot of these people, they can sense that we’re actually interested. They’ll tell us real details. They’ll tell us where they came from. They’ll tell us, “I used to be on my football team in high school, but now I’m 34, I’ve got two kids and I work all day and I haven’t done anything active since my mid-20s.” They tell us these things and we hear where people are really coming from and we get the details from them about their lives that they volunteer when they’re asking for advice.

What we do is we don’t just archive that or we don’t just say, “Well, thanks Bud, go buy something.” We say, “Hey, that’s really interesting.” And we empathize and we try to learn more about them, “Why did you stop? Is it time? Is that the probably? Is it that you don’t really know what to do?” He’s like, “No, times not really the issue, it’s just that every time I go in the gym, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and not making any progress.” “What would progress look like?”

We find out. We take the conversation. We keep going. We don’t just listen once. We listen again and again and again until we can learn something that we can help them with.

Andrew: And your people can do that, can go back and forth and just understand and get to that? How do you train somebody to do that?

Andy: It’s hard. First off, we try to hire really good people. We’re not outsourcing our support to Mumbai or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with that in certain cases, but for us we really feel strongly that we want very articulate people that actually understand GMB and understand what we’re doing to be our frontline of support.

Some of our support people are actually certified trainers. They could be out teaching our stuff, but they enjoy helping people via email. So, they understand our programs back and forth. They can listen to somebody and hear what’s going on with them and give them very detailed and very intelligent answers.

Andrew: I’ve been so fascinated by this. By understanding what customer–let me take it back. A lot of what I’ve done at Mixergy is to try to understand where great companies come from. What’s the origin? What’s the reason that they become great?

What I discovered is that often it’s like a pain that they have, that their customers have, a deep pain that they would be willing to pay anything to solve. Frankly a lot, even to just feel that it’s addressed. I’m actually writing a book. I was for a long time putting it off. I’m so rapid about this that I’m writing it. What I realize is it doesn’t stop once the company is started. It continues after that.

One of the ways that companies do it is by going through customer service emails and tech support. I interviewed one of the founders of The Honest Company and he talked about–Christopher Gavigan, he’s Jessica Alba’s cofounder–he talked about how he does it via email, but he has a really sophisticated software in place to automatically figure out what people are complaining about so they can create products. I want to know on this level how it’s done.

The reason I said, “How do you train people to do it?” is because you’re basically training them to give themselves more work. Every time they email back a customer and say, “Look, tell me why you did it,” they’re asking for another email and frankly, those are the longest replies that you get back, that you have to spend more time defragmenting.

Andy: Yeah. There are a few things that I realized when I was handling all the support. One is the question that people ask is almost never the question they most need answered. There’s always something under that. Why are they asking about flexibility? Probably because they have pain from stiffness. So, what we’re really–like you said, when you ask a detailed question, you’re getting more back. We hire people that are very passionate, deep learners. We hire people specifically that love learning, that can’t get enough of it.

What happens is with lots of interaction, you start picking out patterns. You start to have things gel in your mind. You start to realize, “This is the type of person that we can help. This is the kind of person that maybe we should send to somebody else that we know that does it better. This is the kind of person that would have nothing to offer. But this person should really check this out. Hey, we’ve got an article about that. We’ll help them out that way.

Andrew: You’ll link to the article about it.

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: Do you mind if–I hired a researcher to help go through my interviews to find these moments where a company understands their customer’s pain and then creates a solution for it. The story we were going to use for this topic was going to be The Honest Company, the interview I did with them. Do you mind if I follow up with you and look for specific examples to use in that section?

Andy: Absolutely.

Andrew: He’s working on it now, actually. My call right after this interview is with him to figure that out. Let me close it out with this thing. There’s so much else I can talk to you about. You guys are doing 300,000, 400,000 hits a month. I was checking out again on SimilarWeb because you’re so much fun to spy on because you’re the goods. I turned you down, actually. I really liked the woman who–what’s her name, Gina. I really like Gina, who introduced us. I kept turning it down.

But there was something that kept bringing me back to Gina and she never took offense. She just said, “Here, let me explain to you what this is. Let me walk you through this,” which is really helpful. So then I kept looking through your site. You guys are really good with SEO. You’re really good with referrals like Lifehacker sent you a bunch of traffic recently according to SimilarWeb, right? What was that article?

Andy: That was actually a HIIT mobility routine that we have. A friend of a friend actually found that on YouTube, and she is a writer for Lifehacker. She posted that up.

Andrew: I see. I could get deep into how you get your traffic. Here’s a thing I thought I could end with. When I asked you at the beginning of this interview, “What’s a win for you?” you said something about connections. I thought, “All right, he’s a person who’s looking for affiliates because it will drive more sales.” You said, “Andrew, that’s not–” You’re shaking your head right now. “That’s not it at all.”

Then you started telling me what it was, which is unusual. Most people say, “Andrew, I do this because I want biz dev. I do this because I want exposure to the investors and venture capitalists or people at their firm who are listening to this. I never heard anyone say this kind of connection. What do you have in mind? What do you think is going to come from this?

Andy: I’ve never spoken about GMB as a business publicly before. This is a very strange thing for me. I know you have a lot of smart people that watch this. Hi, guys. They know people too. We always want to hire smart people. We always want to be connected with smart people, even if it never turns into the business development or anything. We just want to be around smarter people and learn from them.

I specifically sometimes this year in 2017, I must hire a technical marketer. I’d be happy to help train that person and teach them a lot of things they don’t know, but I need somebody with a certain kind of love of learning, with a certain kind of interest in really getting deep into a lot of the things that we’ve talked about today. If somebody is watching this and we get to talking and through that, I find a connection that helps me find that person sometime this year, I’m going to super happy.

Andrew: What’s a technical marketer?

Andy: Technical marketing is just like a lot of it sounds really unsexy, like setting up email campaigns and stuff. It’s also being able to–it’s all the things that are connecting the website and the social and the email and the customer intelligence with the helpdesk, with all of that stuff and seeing how it all fits together and figuring out how to use technology to market not just effectively but in a way that really helps the client and the company both?

Andrew: Kind of like what Jermaine–you know Jermaine Griggs?

Andy: Yeah.

Andrew: You guys don’t use Infusionsoft like he does. You guys Klaviyo?

Andy: We’ve been using Klaviyo. We’re actually moving over to Drip after Clay has needled me for months and months about it. But I actually looked at Drip a long time ago and it wasn’t quite ready, but now it’s amazing. We’re moving over to Drip as we speak.

Andrew: Clay is a freaking insane guy. I admire the hell out of him. I’m looking at my calendar. I think it’s tomorrow, maybe it’s next week. The guy is running–I don’t know how big the freaking company is. It’s huge. On January 19th at 2:00 p.m. specific, he’s getting on a video screen share with me to show me how great Drip is so that I understand it, not somebody else at his company. I checked. He wants to walk me through so I understand why Drip that he bought is so good. Who does this?

Andy: Clay Collins does. That’s what makes him one of the best.

Andrew: That’s one of the beauties, the benefits of having done these interviews. I get to see a lot of what’s on the camera in the interviews. It’s the behind the scenes stuff where you get to see the person is who they are publicly that the cynic inside me goes, “Shut up. Look at this. The guy is putting in the freaking work. Don’t be cynical and say he lucked into it or whatever. Do the freaking hard work. Get up. Show it to people, do the thing.”

All right. You do that. I’m really glad to have you on. Anyone who wants to go check out your website should go do it–GMB.io.

Andy: Yes, sir.

Andrew: I’d love to see somebody do it–imagine if Noah Kagan sees this and he’s checking on his ad and he finally gets that handstand.

Andy: If any of your listeners watch this show and post a handstand on Instagram, I will send them a dollar.

Andrew: No. First of all, it’s got to be more than a dollar. I’ll tell you what. I don’t want to manage the money of it, but I would do something like–can I give you like $100 and the first 10 people you give $10 to?

Andy: That would be awesome.

Andrew: Right now put your PayPal email address in Skype chat.

Andy: I’ll put up $100 of my own money for that.

Andrew: Perfect. The first ten people who listen to this and do a handstand and put it on Instagram–it’s not real unless I see it on Instagram. Then you’ll get $10. Did we just screw like Noah’s sad here? He’s got his whole Noah Kagan Presents thing and we’re–I’m giving them all these little ways to make money.

Andy: He’s the best, man. He’s amazing.

Andrew: The Penny Hoarder interviewee is probably listening–I love that interview with the founder of Penny Hoarder. He’s probably listening going, “I’ve got to get this $10 by doing a handstand and I’ve got to get the $1 by subscribing to the podcast.”

All right. If you don’t remember, here are the two sponsors–Bench will do your books right. If you go to Bench.com/Mixergy, you’ll see two very discriminating people, one of with a design eye, one with a tech perspective, two people who you know, who you recognize who say how much they admire different aspects of Bench and I really urge you to go check out Bench.co/Mixergy to see them and to understand why you should also sign up.

And finally, if you like this podcast, forget the dollar, forget everything else. I’m telling you, you’re going to really dig Noah Kagan’s podcast. I listened to the first episode in its scratchy, unedited version. I stopped listening because I heard it on a Friday. I said, “I’ve got to have this for Monday. I’m getting too charged up. I’m going to go home and I’m going to drive my whole family crazy.”

So I hit pause. I texted Noah like a madman because he responds to every text message, I don’t know how. I said, “Noah, this is insane.” Of course, he doesn’t say thank you. He says, “What’s insane about it? What’s so good about it?” So now I’m like dictating into my iPhone five things that are good about it, which is hard. I’ll tell you what’s good about that one episode that I heard.

First of all, he gives a guy real actionable advice, which is good. Second, he slips in these motivational things about him that I dig to hear from somebody. I can’t get that out of interviews. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s awkward in a conversation for you to say, “And you’ve got to want it.” But it kind of fits in his conversation.

Third, I really like since he’s growing his podcast from scratch, to hear him say to the guest, “This is what I think you should do.” And then he’s saying, “Here’s how I think about it for growing this podcast, for example. Here’s my spreadsheet that helps me think through how I can hit my numbers on the podcast. Here’s the way I think about growing SumoMe.” To hear the machinations–is that the word? That Noah Kagan goes through to market, really interesting.

All right. Go check out in whatever podcast app you like Noah Kagan Presents. Don’t forget to shoot Noah Kagan an email, Mixergy@OkDork.com. There’s a very good chance he’ll just respond personally, which is a good way to get to know Noah. That’s how I got to know him. I emailed him once personally years ago. We became good friends. We’ve been to each other’s homes. He’s been a really big help to me. Forget the buck. Just go sign up to the podcast. The buck and the interaction with Noah are a nice bonus.

How’s that for an ad? That’s a killer ad. People should really be happy with their ads at Mixergy.

Andy: Awesome ad. I don’t think he could have asked for anything better.

Andrew: Right. I used to suck with the ads. In the interviews I used to say, “This ad sucked. I shouldn’t even charge the guest.” But I got better and better and better and I think the audience can hear it. If they can’t, they’re going to tell me, Andy, because they’re allowed.

This interview's sponsor

With Bench, you get a professional bookkeeping team to do your books for you and our simple, elegant software to review your finances. It’s everything you need to forget about your bookkeeping, without actually forgetting about your bookkeeping.

Noah Kagan Presents – If you’re listening to me, I think you’ll enjoy a new podcast by Noah Kagan. It’s called Noah Kagan Presents and unlike Mixergy, Noah will interview people who are just getting started—people who are at that moment in their lives when things start to turn. He’s with giving people challenges because he wants them to take action like finding their first customers and getting out of their comfort zone.

But get this, if you subscribe to Noah Kagan Presents Noah’s also going to give you $1. Just email him at mixergy at okdork dot com to ask for your dollar.